A nunatak (exposed element of a ridge) pokes through the ice sheet in Antarctica. About 90% of the world's ice is found in Antarctica where the ice is nearly three miles thick in places and the ice cap drowns entire mountain ranges. This shot was taken as the BBC was beginning to fly the route that Scott and his men took nearly 100 years previously

The Taiga in Finland is the greatest forest on Earth, containing at least a third of all the world's trees. The vast stretches of forest are restricted to one or two species of tree, usually conifer. Life is scarce in these forests as conifer needles are hard to digest. Some of the trees can be loaded with as much as three tonnes of snow. This is why conifers tend to be cone shaped with sloping sides to encourage the snow to slide off

Aerial shot of sapphire blue meltwater lake on Greenland ice sheet. It formed in a matter of days, was several miles wide and carved a meltwater channel through the ice eventually plunging a vertical mile into the heart of the ice sheet. Several weeks later a crack appeared on the lake bed and the entire lake drained into the ice sheet in a matter of hours

King penguins silhouetted at dawn, South Georgia. The King Penguin is the second largest species of penguin, weighing up to 16 kgs. They eat small fish - mainly lanternfish and squid, and repeatedly dive to more than 100 metres to find lunch. There are an estimated 2.23 million pairs of King Penguins with numbers increasing

Cameramen Dough Anderson and Hugh Miller created a bespoke underwater tripod which they bolted to the ice ceiling. They were able to get extraordinarily stable, macro shots of ice formations or ice chandeliers, which were inhabited by millions of tiny ice fish whose bodies were full of anti-freeze. Under ice diving is not for the faint-hearted – it is the most high risk type of diving

Lying belly-down on Antarctic sea-ice at the edge of a small hole, a cameraman gets a shock when a killer whale mother and calf explode out of the water in front of his face. The cameramen said that the only way to get underwater images was to hand-hold a camera on a pole in the icy water, wait and hope. As the orcas came up to breathe they would eye-ball them with curiosity and spray oily breath all over their faces. They added that to be on your stomach precariously perched on the edge of the ice with a killer whale staring down at you was simultaneously terrifying and awe-inspiring

A humpback whale dives for krill amidst thousands of short-tailed shearwaters. It is mid-summer in the Bering Sea, off Alaska's Aleutian islands. Cold water and long sunny days leads to some of the richest seas in the world. Humpbacks have travelled for months from Hawaii and shearwaters the length of the planet from Australia. Filming from the boat, the BBC watched shearwaters accidentally fly straight into the side of breaching whales, and humpbacks accidentally swallow and spit out shearwaters. At 18 million, this is the largest gathering of seabirds on the planet